


Darkest Day

by pigeonking



Series: The Missing Doctor Adventures - Season Two [5]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-27
Updated: 2018-04-27
Packaged: 2019-04-28 13:55:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14450682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pigeonking/pseuds/pigeonking
Summary: Sorry it's taken so long, but here is the latest episode of the Missing Doctor's season 2 adventures and the Doctor and Bex are searching for the Master and Clover...





	Darkest Day

“Calm down, Doctor!” Bex scalded, trying to keep the anxiety out of her voice. “Are you trying to break the TARDIS?”

The Doctor was barely listening to her as he barrelled from one side of the six-sided console to the other, violently tugging levers and punching buttons in a barely concealed fury.

“Doctor, I said…” Bex began.

“I heard what you said!” the Doctor snarled quietly. “Believe it or not I am calm. What you’re seeing on the surface is nothing compared to what’s boiling underneath! The Master has Clover and our unborn baby. I shouldn’t have left her on her own for so long!”

“That’s the real problem, isn’t it?” Bex replied calmly. “You blame yourself.”

“How can I not?” the Doctor returned and Bex could hear the pain in his voice. “I was such a selfish bastard! I had to go gallivanting off in the TARDIS, didn’t I?”

“How could you have known that this was going to happen?” Bex tried to reassure him.

The Doctor stared at her, his face filled with thunder.

“Don’t give me that!” he chided, “Of course I knew!”

“How could you have known?”

“We all knew that there would be an alien interest in the unborn child of a human/Time Lord hybrid. I should have been more careful, more vigilant!” the Doctor chastised himself angrily.

“Alright, alright!” Bex conceded, raising her hands placatingly. “Maybe you could have been, but abusing the TARDIS console isn’t gonna help us get them back, is it? So… what’s your plan? I’m assuming that you have one?”

The Doctor looked at her again and his features softened into a troubled smile.

“Don’t be daft.” He said. “Of course I’ve got a plan!”

 

Port Andromeda was the last port of call that any star ships could make for refuelling or supplies before leaving Earth’s solar system entirely. The exterior resembled one of those old fashioned spinning tops that kids used to play with in the 20th Century and it did indeed spin, albeit slowly.

Inside there were various decks for shopping, ship repairs, entertainment, accommodation (both permanent and temporary) and recreation. There was even an entire deck that had been converted into a Disneyland style theme park. Then there were the lower decks where waste disposal was taken care of… the sewers of the entire facility.

The TARDIS loudly announced its arrival on one of the lower shopping decks. The various species that bustled about the vast open market space barely batted an eyelid. Such sights were commonplace in an environment such as this.

The Doctor and Bex exited the police box, closing the door behind them. In his hand the Doctor wielded a cumbersome looking contraption with an array of flashing antennae and beeping nodules.

“Do you mind explaining to me again what that thing does?” Bex asked patiently.

The Doctor sighed and as they weaved their way through the crowd he proceeded to explain once more.

“This ‘thing’, as you call it, detects and isolates Artron energy signatures.” He began. “You see TARDISes absorb Artron energy as they travel through the vortex and people who travel in TARDISes tend to build up an accumulation of it themselves overtime and the longer you spend travelling through time and space the more pronounced that Atron energy signature becomes. Now I was able to get a fix on the Artron signature of the Master’s TARDIS and follow him. Unfortunately, the Master didn’t want to be followed so he was able to disguise his trail, however, for some reason he stopped covering his tracks and enabled me to follow him again and according to the instruments within my TARDIS this was the last place he visited. Now, Clover also has her own unique Artron energy signature from travelling in the TARDIS with me and this ‘thing’ is tuned into it, so if she’s here we’ll find her.”

“And if she isn’t?” Bex wondered.

“Then hopefully we can pick up the Master’s trail again and follow him to his next destination. But he must have wanted me to follow him here for a reason. She has to be here!” the Doctor reasoned.

“Unless this is a trap.” Bex suggested.

“Unless this is a trap.” The Doctor agreed.

They continued on in grim silence. The only sounds came from the general hubbub of the crowd that swarmed around them, but then over that, a distressed cry caught their attention.

“Help!” a woman’s voice cried out over the throng. “I’ve lost my baby! I can’t find my baby!”

The Doctor and Bex looked at each other and then made a beeline for the distressed woman without hesitation, the Doctor stowing his gadget within one of his voluminous inner pockets as he went.

They found the woman staggering around in a dazed and panicked haze as she called out for her missing child. No one else that was walking around her seemed to be paying the blindest bit of notice.

The Doctor and Bex approached her.

“It’s alright, I’m the Doctor and if there’s anything that I can do to help find your child you can count on me to do it!” the Doctor declared.

Bex could only look on in admiration at the Doctor’s dramatic introduction.

“Are you with Port Security?” the woman asked.

“I’m better than Port Security!” the Doctor assured her with a smile.

“What is your child’s name? Where did you last see them?” Bex asked helpfully.

“My little girl is Tanya. She’s only three years old!” the woman answered tearfully. “I remember she was with me when we left the food stalls. We’d had her favourite Centauri Six burgers for lunch. I’m always telling her to never let go of my hand.”

“Where are the food stores, madam?” the Doctor asked.

The woman pointed off over to the far left hull of the port.

“That way.” She said. “Two Port Security officers are already looking for her over there.”

The Doctor and Bex looked over to where she pointed. They saw one man in a security uniform hanging around near a huge open disposal shaft looking almost as worried as the distraught mother.

“Get yourself a coffee and wait in the food stalls.” Bex suggested with a sweet smile to the mother. “The Doctor and I will get Tanya back safe and sound!”

Then Bex took off after the Doctor who was already halfway to the area where the stressed-out security guard was standing.

The Port Security officer was a short, slightly overweight man with receding grey-tinged red hair that poked out from under his cap. In his hand he was clutching what appeared to be the shoe of a small little girl.

“Hello, I’m the Doctor and this is Bex. We’re here to help you find Tanya. What can you tell us?” the Doctor announced as he and Bex arrived.

The guard seemed relieved to hear the authority in the Doctor’s voice. Finally, here was someone that could take charge of the situation. It didn’t matter that the Doctor wasn’t wearing a uniform. There was just something in the way that he carried himself that inspired confidence. 

“Oh, thank goodness!” the guard said. “We found her shoe just sitting on the opening of this disposal shaft. She must have fallen in there… or maybe she was pulled in!”

“Pulled in by what?” the Doctor asked. “Where does that shaft lead to?”

“To the lower waste disposal decks.” The guard replied. “Everybody knows that there are things that live down there. Anyone that goes down there never comes back. My partner went down there to find the kid. She’s a fool. We’ll never see her again!”

“So, you just let your partner go down there all by herself? What a hero.” Bex sneered with disgust.

The guard gestured at his rotund figure.

“Look at me, Miss!” he protested. “I couldn’t fit down there even if I wanted to go! Hey, what’re you doing?”

The Doctor was already clambering into the shaft and beginning his descent down the ladder.

“I’m going to find your partner and this lost little girl and bring them back!” the Doctor declared.

Once the Doctor had disappeared out of sight Bex climbed in after him and began her own descent.

The guard just watched them go, nervously mopping sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his uniform, still clutching the tiny shoe in one fist.

 

The Doctor was waiting for Bex as she reached the bottom of the ladder. As her booted foot slid into the grimy sludge that caked the bottom of the shaft she lamented her decision to where a skirt today, but fortunately her metal studded combat boots were just long enough that the sludge only came up to just passed her ankles and didn’t slosh over the top of the boots and onto her bare legs at all.

“I wish I had some nano-clothes like Clover so that I could change into something a little more appropriate for this environment.” She sighed nonetheless.

“Why didn’t you say so before?” the Doctor answered. “I could easily make you some if you want?”

“Really?” Bex smiled. “You could do that?”

“Of course!” the Doctor replied with mock indignation. “This is me we’re talking about, Bex!”

“Silly me.” Bex snarked.

The shaft that they found themselves in curved of into two different directions. They could go left or right, but there was no way of knowing which way that they should go.

“If these tunnels are so dangerous why do they have ladders so easily accessible for people to just climb down here?” Bex wondered. “Don’t they have any such thing as Health and Safety in the future?”

“I imagine that they used to send maintenance workers down here, until people started disappearing and never coming back and then they just never bothered to get rid of the ladders after they stopped using them.” The Doctor suggested.

“They could at least have made the upper shaft openings smaller so that people couldn’t fit down them anymore.” Bex said.

“Yes.” The Doctor agreed. “I wonder why they didn’t?”

“And just how did these creatures that are supposed to live down here get here in the first place?” Bex wondered.

“You remember those urban legends about alligators in the sewers back in the 20th and 21st Centuries? It’s probably something just like that.” The Doctor mused.

“So, have you decided which way we should go yet?” Bex asked with a cheeky smile.

“Nope. No, I haven’t.” the Doctor admitted. He dipped his hand into his outer pocket and pulled out a coin. “Let’s toss for it. Pincers or Stingers?”

“Say what now?” Bex’s eyes boggled.

The Doctor showed her the coin which was made from some kind of unidentified purple metal and was clearly alien. It was triangular rather than round and depicted a pair of scorpion’s pincers on one side and a dual barbed stinger on the flipside.

“It’s a Skorpinoid coin.” He explained. “Pincers or Stingers?”

“Pincers.” Bex decided.

The Doctor flipped the coin into the air and caught it deftly as it spun its way back down. He slapped the coin onto the back of his wrist and then lifted his hand to look at the result.

“Pincers it is.” He declared. “We go left!”

And so off they set down the left-hand tunnel.

As they went they came across other ladders leading up to the surface and once they narrowly escaped being covered in food waste as someone above emptied a load of rotten vegetables down into the sludge. They had been walking for maybe ten minutes when they came to another tunnel opening that led deeper into the bowels of the waste decks. The tunnel did continue round to the left, but now they had the option of turning down into this new shaft too. That was not the most remarkable thing, however. Floating face down in the sludge was the body of what looked like a man wearing black leather, which was now stained by the waste he floated in.

“The Port Security guy at the top said that his partner was a woman, right?” Bex checked.

“That’s right.” The Doctor confirmed. “Which means that this isn’t her.”

He lowered himself to his haunches in order to examine the body, flipping it over onto its back so that he could look at the face. The man was wearing a mask that had been partially torn at the bottom, exposing his unshaven chin. The mask’s features depicted a snarling reptilian beast.

“Why was he wearing that?” the Doctor wondered out loud.

“And why was he wearing these?” Bex added and she showed the Doctor the man’s hands.

He was wearing gloves where the fingers ended in long serrated claws. A scrap of cloth that matched the colour of the uniforms worn by the Port Security officers was caught in one of these wicked looking talons.

“Whoever he is it looks like he got into a bit of a barney with the security guard that came down here. He lost and she broke his neck. But was it deliberate or by accident?” the Doctor mused.

“Whatever happened my guess is that the guard probably went down this tunnel next.” Bex suggested.

“Let’s see, shall we?” the Doctor said. “There’s definitely something fishy going on around here.”

He and Bex set off down the side tunnel, leaving the corpse of the mysterious man behind them.  

Further down this tunnel they eventually came to another T-junction.

“Do you want us to toss for it again?” Bex asked.

“Nah,” the Doctor answered. “Let’s just go left. It seems to be serving us well so far.”

And so, left they went.

They hadn’t walked along this tunnel too far before it took a sharp right turn and they bungled straight into something big lurking in the sludge.

The Doctor and Bex stood back cautiously as they took in the bulky form of the monstrosity in front of them.

Whatever it was it did not appear to be interested in them in any way whatsoever. It resembled a cross between a large humped back manatee with a small snail-like head that seemed to be permanently half submerged in the sludge as it greedily hoovered up the rotting contents of whatever waste it contained. It barely even seemed to realise that the Doctor and Bex were there and did not even spare them a glance with those long eye-tipped antennae that grew out of its head.

 

“Bex, does this strike you as something that would be responsible for snatching children and making people generally disappear if they come down here?” the Doctor asked.

“Not especially no.” Bex answered. “Maybe there’s something else down here other than this snail-cow thing?”

“Maybe.” The Doctor conceded with a nod. “Or maybe there’s something else entirely going on around here. Come along, Bex. I don’t think we’re going to find Tanya down here.”

They turned around to go back the way they had come and that’s when the reptilian thing with the claws attacked them.

The Doctor narrowly missed getting his throat slashed open by the thing’s hooked talons. In his first glance the Doctor recognised instantly the same kind of mask that had been worn by the man they’d found face down in the sludge… and the same kind of razor-clawed gloves.

“Hello there!” the Doctor remarked cheerfully and then delivered a right hook to the lizard faced man before it could slash again.

The man staggered backwards in a daze. He hadn’t expected his intended prey to fight back.

Before he could recover Bex stepped forward and kicked him in the shins.

The man shrieked in agony and instinctively reached down to cradle his injured leg and then the Doctor punched him again and knocked him onto his back into the sludge.

The Doctor sat on top of him and ripped the mask away to reveal the bearded face of a surprised and slightly frightened man.

“Where’s Tanya?” the Doctor snarled angrily and before the man could even attempt an answer he found his head being dipped under the sludge and all manner of putrid, rancid waste began to slide up his nose and into his startled open mouth.

After a few seconds the Doctor yanked the man’s head up again.

“I won’t ask a second time. Where is Tanya?”

“Fuck you!” the man spluttered defiantly.

“Wrong answer.” The Doctor declared in an almost gleeful fury and he dipped the man’s head once more. “This is what happens to monsters who steal innocent children from their families!”

The Doctor kept the man’s head under for much longer than last time and seemed to be showing no signs of letting him back up again.

“Doctor, don’t you think he’s had enough?” Bex asked nervously.

“Don’t be daft, Bex.” The Doctor snarled. “This bastard’s getting exactly what he deserves!”

Then a familiar voice cut in.

“So, you’re killing people now?”

The Doctor and Bex both looked over together at the newcomer that stood over them in the opening of the tunnel.

Standing there in the uniform of the Port Security was Clover.

“Clover!” the Doctor stammered in amazement and almost without thinking about it he pulled the man’s head out of the sludge.

He scrambled off of the inert form of the man and dashed to Clover taking her into his arms, crushing her to him in an embrace that he never wanted to break. Clover yelped in surprise, but tentatively returned the embrace.

Bex looked on happily at the reunion, beaming from ear to ear.

Somewhere in the sludge they heard the coughing splutter of the man puking his guts up as he regained consciousness.

“I hate to break up this little reunion.” Bex said reluctantly. “But maybe we’d better deal with this guy?”

The Doctor and Clover disentangled with a parting kiss then the Doctor reached down and grabbed up the man, hauling him to his feet and slamming him against the wall.

“Are you ready to talk now?” he asked.

 

Little Tanya had never been so cold or so scared in all of her short life. She had been just behind her mummy when they had walked out of the Centauri Six burger bar. Mummy had been so wrapped up in talking about the shopping that she’d need to buy before they could go home that she hadn’t held Tanya’s hand like she normally would and the little girl had to work very hard to keep up with her in the busy crowds. It was no wonder that mummy hadn’t noticed when the bad man had grabbed Tanya from behind, clamping a hand over her mouth so that she wouldn’t scream and then some smelly thing in the palm of the man’s hand had made her feel sleepy and that was the last thing she remembered before she woke up. Tanya had awoken to find herself in what looked like a big freezer, like a big version of the one that mummy had at home where she kept all the pizzas, burgers and ice creams.

There was nothing fun like that in this freezer. Just lots and lots of different kinds of frozen meat hanging from hooks on the ceiling. It was so cold and Tanya felt glad of the coat that she was wearing. She zipped it up right to the top and made sure that she put her hood over her head.

Sometimes the air inside the space port could feel quite chilly, part of the administration’s attempts to replicate the seasons on Earth so that residents would feel more at home. Apparently on Earth now it was supposed to be winter and as a result Tanya’s mummy insisted that she wear this coat whenever they went out somewhere in the bustling space port. Even so, the air circulated around the space station had never been this cold.

Tanya had no idea how long she had been in the freezer or how long she would continue to be in there. She started to wonder if she would ever see her mummy again when suddenly the door opened and a man came in.

This man looked familiar. She had seen him working behind the counter of the Centauri Six burger bar when she and mummy had eaten there earlier. Was that where she was?

The man stalked over to her with a menacing gleam in his eye and for the first time Tanya spotted the big scary meat cleaver in his left hand.

“So, you like Centauri Six burgers, huh?” the man growled. “Bet ya never thought you’d end up being one?”

And with those words he grabbed Tanya by the arm and started to drag her out of the freezer room.

“No, let go of me!” Tanya shrieked.

“Some of our alien clients like their meat to be a little more exotic, if ya know what I mean?” the man was saying as he dragged her kicking and screaming into his kitchen. “And while there’s a demand for it we’re only happy to supply it.”

The man lifted her up and slammed her down hard on his metal work bench.

Tanya was crying now. Her back hurt from when the bad man had dropped her on the hard table.

The man raised his cleaver over his head and winked at Tanya, holding her down with his other hand.

“No hard feelings, huh, kid?” he sneered.

Tanya closed her eyes… she didn’t want to see what was going to happen next. She didn’t want to see it coming.

There was a loud electronic buzzing sound and then nothing.

Tanya opened her eyes and saw the bad man looking down on her with a pained and surprised expression on his ugly face. The fingers that held the cleaver slackened and let the deadly implement clatter harmlessly to the tiles below, then the man toppled over out of view after it.

Standing behind the man was a pretty blonde woman in the uniform of the Port Security, her legs were apart in a shooting stance and she held a blaster out before her in both hands.

The woman smiled.

“It’s okay, Tanya. You’re safe now.”

 

The Doctor, Clover and Bex watched the reunion between Tanya and her mother with a sense of quiet satisfaction.

Apparently, Centauri Six had been running this racket for quite some time now. Every so often a child would go missing and the racket runners would make sure that it was blamed on the monsters that supposedly resided in the waste disposal decks. If anyone ever went down there Centauri Six had their own people down there disguised as monsters with very real sharp claws and they would make sure that whoever went down never went back up again. Every so often they’d allow the mutilated remains to be found. It only helped to perpetuate the myth that they were trying to maintain. Before long there were very few who were brave enough or desperate enough to venture down there at all.

That was until Clover came along. Thanks to her and the Doctor and Bex Centauri Six were going out of business and all of the perpetrators were now in custody.

“Even when I’m not with you you’re still fighting the good fight.” The Doctor said to Clover with barely concealed admiration.

“I had to occupy myself somehow while I waited for you to come and rescue me and I did know you would come.” Clover replied with a shrug and a wan smile.

“How long were you waiting for us?” Bex had to ask.

“I’d say I’ve been here nearly six months now ever since the Master dropped me off here and took off with our baby.” At these words she turned her complete focus upon the Doctor. There were tears in her eyes. “He took our little girl, Doctor and there was nothing I could do to stop him!”

 

**To be Continued…**

 


End file.
